There’s a kind of innocence to some humour, an innocence it needs in order to work. You realise this when you think about Guacamelee, Drinkbox’s breakout PS Vita hit – a game with these strange things called “memes” in it, a game named with a pun. I feel like we probably wouldn’t enjoy a game with memes in it in 2021 – they’re familiar now and sort of oddly important, and so you lose the innocence. But Drinkbox has kept the innocence elsewhere with Nobody Saves the World. It’s another silly, but also seemingly very good, game that’s built on humour first and clever evolution of genre just behind it, and another game named with a pun.
Nobody Saves the World previewDeveloper: Drinkbox StudiosPublisher: Drinkbox StudiosPlatform: Played on PC via ParsecAvailability: Out Summer-ish 2021 on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
You play as someone called Nobody in Nobody Saves the World, which drops the wrestling metroidvania costume of Guacamelee (barring a few familiarly chicken-sized tunnels) for the fantastical cloak of a dungeon-crawling action RPG. It’s not the genre I expected, after battering my way through Guacamelee, but it’s a result of the studio wanting to keep “engaged and creative,” as lead designer Ian Campbell put it, and the result is a game that feels the same: energetic and zippy and full of snap.
There are small twists on the genre. The first is that Nobody Saves the World is built around switching “forms” on the fly. Nobody is a blank and comically useless canvas of a character who nabs a special wand, the waving of which allows you to transform into one of what Campbell says is 17 or 18 forms available for the moment (“we’re trying to do more but that’s what we have right now”), each a little ridiculous and purposefully “non-standard”. I took on my first dungeon as a rat, for instance, with some poison-y, gnawing attacks, and then unlocked a fairly run-of-the-mill ranger, followed by an odd, much less run-of-the-mill magician that summons rabbit familiars and jabs people with a fan of cards. There’s a horse, and so on (I am not selling this as laugh-out-loud, I’m aware! But sometimes humour is simply levity, and Drinkbox has a magically light touch).
The ARPG side of things is traditional, at first glance, asking you to progress across the overworld by crashing through its separate dungeons, but Drinkbox’s spin is that you complete little objectives or quests, however, as opposed to grinding. In practise this doesn’t feel hugely different – you gnaw your way through X number of enemies, clear a big dungeon, or summon Y magic rabbits and that grants you some points with which you unlock more characters, more skills, and so on (including the “stars” required to progress to new parts of the overworld) but the actual process is still the same: do more playing, get more things.